"Serious as the man was, there are glints and gleams of quiet humor throughout this remarkable human document. One night in May he wrote, 'Stars and moon are bright this evening; frogs are singing in the meadow, and the fire-flies are twinkling over the grass by the spring. Tree toads have been singing to-day. Set two hens to-night, nailed them in. If you want to see determination, look in a setting hen's eye. Robins have been carrying food to their nests in the pine trees, and the barn swallows fighting for feathers in the air; the big barn is filled with their conversation.'
"In the city he missed, as he wrote, 'the light upon the hills.' Again, 'The stars are the eyes of the sky. The sun sets like a god bowing his head. Pine needles catch the light that has streamed through them for a hundred years. The wind drives the clouds one day as if they were waves of crested brown.' Where indeed in the crowded city streets was he to listen 'to the language of the leaves,' and how indeed, 'Feel the colors of the West.'
"Is it not possible that something more even than the example and influence of his character was lost to the world in his death? What possibilities were there not in store for a man who could feel and write like this: 'Grand thunderstorm this evening. Vibrations shook the house and the flashes of lightning were continuous for a short time. It is authority and majesty personified, and one instinctively bows in its presence, not with a feeling of dread, but of admiration and respect.'
"It was in the thunder and shock and blaze of just such a storm that I stood not long ago among his own Berkshire Hills, hoping thus to prepare myself by pilgrimage for this halting but earnest tribute to a great-hearted gentleman, who, in his quiet way, meant so much to so many of his fellow humans."
Walter B. Street
W. L. Sawtelle of Williams, who knew this great player in his playing days, writes as follows:
"No Williams contemporary of Walter Bullard Street can forget two outstanding facts of his college career: his immaculate personal character and his undisputed title to first rank among the football men whom Williams has developed. He was idolized because of his athletic prowess; he was loved because he was every inch a man. His personality lifted his game from the level of an intercollegiate contest to the plane of a man's expression of loyalty to his college, and his supremacy on the football field gave a new dignity to the undergraduate's ideals of true manhood.
"His name is indelibly written in the athletic annals of Williams, and his influence, apparently cut off by his early death, is still a vital force among those who cheered his memorable gains on the gridiron and who admired him for his virile character."
W. D. Osgood
Gone from among us is that great old-time hero, Win Osgood. In this chapter of thoroughbreds, let us read the tribute George Woodruff pays him: